Wednesday, 26 March 2008

This programme offers three idiots the opportunity to foist their idiot idea upon the UK. Their idiot ideas are judged by a bunch of idiot food tasters, who are to a man middle-aged white women who have long been deprived access to cosmetics. Prompted for positive comments about the foodstuffs, they venture remarks like ‘Caramel’. Caramel is a value-neutral noun. Caramel is not a sentence. If it is to be given as feedback, it needs to be in context. It needs to be in a sentence.

Anyway, the first idiot’s idiot idea is ‘Soup In A Bun’. ‘I don’t get it’, burbles some Tesco idiot. Once you’ve seen the product, it’s really quite difficult not to get it. It’s soup, in a bun. How could it possibly be simpler? ‘Soup In A Bun, No, Really, It Really Is Just Soup. In A Bun’. Maybe Mr Tesco would prefer a shorter name: Soup & A Bun. This doesn’t quite convey the innovation of putting the soup in a bun. However, it could leech on the upcoming Sex In The City/Sex & The City film publicity. Soup and a bun is also a fundamentally good idea. ‘Soup and a bun?’, you might exclaim. ‘That would be a nice lunch. Oh, soup in a bun? I don’t get it’. This idiot also insisted on delivering his presentation in doggerel, perhaps the only person ever inspired by the couplet ‘Soup In A Bun/A Meal For One’.

The second idiot did not understand the concept of marketing. ‘There’s lots of good fudge out there, so why would anyone buy yours?’, questioned a Tesco executive. ‘My fudge tastes better’, came the confident retort. Luckily, the Tesco chap didn’t prolong this nightmarish circular argument. ‘I’m sure it does, but how will people know before they buy it?’ ‘My fudge tastes better’, the idiot would reiterate, slightly menacingly. Advised to reshape the fudge because certain people – the EU, no doubt – might not find a brown lump appetising, the idiot would not countenance such good sense. ‘We’d have to use different packaging’ was the bewildered counterargument. The idiot also claimed that it was ‘intelligent’ fudge, as its makers listened to Radio 4. Awful.

Finally, some idiot didn’t understand that ‘no fat’ is a different claim from ‘no added fat’. This was also the sole non-white idiot. It was her curry sauce that the food tasters rejected.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

Thank god it's over, so repetitive week after week after week after week after week after week. The final was better, but it seemed like they ran out of time. I feel like some of the suppliers seemed to get stitched up, if Tesco were so keen on reducing packaging, why if the soup in a bun thing in a massive plastic bag with a plastic tun inside it. Surely a cardboard box is more environmentally friendly?